I do believe this will still work with the render layers/ compositing nodes, so this I think will definitely have the potential to produce some amazing results.

I think I may well invest in a machine with multiple video cards once this is released and matured a little, it would save me from having to buy multiple machines. OpenCL/ Cuda rendering + OpenCL compositing nodes = :thumbsup:

aelex

04-24-2011, 01:43 PM

this looks like some really good news :bounce:

AwesomeThreeD

04-24-2011, 10:52 PM

This looks extremely suspicious. :surprised

lironmiron

04-24-2011, 11:46 PM

LOL! So for this guy, "decided to return to the Blender Foundation" means, "I already have a working implementation of a whole new renderer that is light years away from the old one for the Blender Foundation."

Only in OSS do you see this kind of anti-hype!

arvinmoses

04-25-2011, 12:42 AM

LOL! So for this guy, "decided to return to the Blender Foundation" means, "I already have a working implementation of a whole new renderer that is light years away from the old one for the Blender Foundation."

... They have a video of the new renderer right..?

Bullit

04-25-2011, 02:09 AM

Nice news.

lironmiron what are you on? see youtube vid.

lironmiron

04-25-2011, 02:13 AM

I saw it. That's how I realized that it was a "working implementation." If I had not seen the video, I would have thought that "decided to return" meant that he was just going to start working on this. However, the video makes it clear that he not only has been working on it, but already has it working (not finished, of course, but that's obvious).

Bullit

04-25-2011, 02:20 AM

Haha! i now see you were being ironic. Apologies.

Venkman

04-25-2011, 04:57 AM

Blender seems to be moving at a pace that would make many companies jealous. Wow. I'm truly floored by what has been going on at the Blender Foundation in the past year alone.

fablefox

04-25-2011, 05:35 AM

what happened currently is great, but it still suffer from what a lot of OSS suffer - improvement based on availability, not what it actually need. GUI take a long time before it being touched upon, despite being commented for so long. Ironic is that they say they now can hire him because of donation to the foundation and shop sales. I wonder how much sales they can get early on if they decided to touch GUI early.

And BMesh...

But I guess that is the nature of open source. People code what they want. If we enfore something they don't like, they can abandon the project. Brecht is hired to do this, something that people complained for so long (the renderer). Even he admit that the renderer "showing it's age". Donation was requested (and locked for the development to continue) for the OpenCL compositor. Cannot blame either, living cost isn't free.

I hope for the next Foundation movie, they will have more cash to improve blender. I also heard from now on they are going 2 month point based updates, and per tool basis. Which is great.

Samo

04-25-2011, 07:51 AM

Not impressed at all. Rendering a scene with a huge background lighting the scene tells next to nothing about the capabilities of a raytracer. It is a very easy exercise for testing a raytracer. It is progressive, but any modern raytracer can be made to work like that. I'm not sure what this news means for the development of the the internal scanliner. Nobody but a group of Blender users focused on visualisation and stills are requesting the Blender internal engine to become a pure raytracer. The problem with a progressive raytracer is that with it you can cover only a fraction of the Blender community needs; it does not have got the cross-purpose (game engine RT, animation, stills) profile of the current internal engine.

One thing is for sure, the dispersion of efforts in the rendering/raytracing world is a never ending story, also in the FOSS side. I'm more curious about why Brecht has stopped working for the Octane project, and soon afterwards he starts working on something which has got a bit of the Octane philosophy into it. I have some guesses about it though.

verb3k

04-25-2011, 01:20 PM

Maybe it's Mr. Radiance's fault?

XInode

04-25-2011, 03:29 PM

I'm more curious about why Brecht has stopped working for the Octane project, and soon afterwards he starts working on something which has got a bit of the Octane philosophy into it. I have some guesses about it though.

You and the rest of the octane community/devs are asking the same questions and speculation is now wearing thin. To me it is a bittersweet moment.

cornel

04-25-2011, 07:00 PM

I thought Radiance has only paused working for the Octane project a while ago,
and now is back on duty as second programmer besides Abstrax?
Where have you read about him quiting?

Some months ago, he announced to spend parts of his time to follow another ideas.
I think this is what he might meant.

Honestly Octane should be at the promised version 1 months ago.
With the main developer not working on it and passing the reins to a new guy they can only blame themselves for being passed up.

If this is anything to do with Octane, Blender is knocked down another peg in my book. If not congratulations to them.

Samo

04-26-2011, 02:18 PM

Well at least in the rendering field there is some real drama and competition, and there is a continous stream of new rendering projects, while others engines keep on dying a long death.

Life and death. This is a nice contrast to other aspects of the 'industry'.

tmcthree

04-26-2011, 03:22 PM

I used blender for a while. But you hit the wall pretty quickly. It seems a pretty amateur operation in general really (I guess thats the nature of open source). They are really keen on bells and whistles but not so keen on getting the fundamentals right.

This renderer seems to be a case in point. Ok it looks quite cool, but in reality will this change your workflow for the better?

DanielWray

04-26-2011, 07:24 PM

This whole 'highly suspect' thing is a bit of a joke.

Octane is octane, cycles is cycles.

Blender is getting a new rendering engine, developed by the once, and now current lead developer of Blender, this being Brecht. If he worked on this engine in his spare time during his time at Octane, and did NOT sign any legal documents stating he couldn't do this then there is absolutely nothing wrong with this at all.

I can understand people who use Octane, and who have bought a license to jump to conclusions, after all you've paid money for it, and now something like this is available for free. But that's life.

Bullit

04-26-2011, 07:39 PM

Brecht has a comment in Youtube about the accusations that are made against him without any evidence.

TwinSnakes

04-26-2011, 07:40 PM

Octane is octane, cycles is cycles.

If he worked on this engine in his spare time during his time at Octane, and did NOT sign any legal documents stating he couldn't do this then there is absolutely nothing wrong with this at all.

Daniel is right.

Brecht said when he left that he was STILL allowed to work on Blender projects

..AND he was working on a shading core rewrite LONG before he went to Octane, I know because I was pissed when he delayed the rewrite until after Blender 2.5 was finished.

If anyone has a bone to pick for similar looking features, it would be the Maya folks IMO.

tmcthree

04-26-2011, 07:40 PM

If he worked on this engine in his spare time during his time at Octane, and did NOT sign any legal documents stating he couldn't do this then there is absolutely nothing wrong with this at all. .
I'm assuming he can quote you in court.

DanielWray

04-26-2011, 09:06 PM

No legal obligation... no legal obligation, it's not a hard concept to figure out.

ice-boy

04-26-2011, 09:16 PM

blender is opensource. everything will be out to the public. why would they steal?

tmcthree

04-26-2011, 09:18 PM

No legal obligation... no legal obligation, it's not a hard concept to figure out.

Yesss, I'm in the final weeks of a law degree, and I wouldn't feel confident giving out that sort of advice, for fear that I'd be sued for negligence. Legal obligations don't simple arise out of written contracts. There are verbal contracts, implied terms (I'm thinking in particular about the emplyoment doctrine of mutual trust and confidence), tort, tortuous interferance. And thats before we even consider intellectual property ownership...

So with all due respect, it is a hard concept.

DuttyFoot

04-26-2011, 09:37 PM

Brecht has a comment in Youtube about the accusations that are made against him without any evidence.

here is his comment to the accusations on youtube

Just to be clear, this does not contain any code from Octane, nor does it use any company secrets. There is plenty of code out there that does GPU ray tracing, see for example SmallLuxGPU, Brigade or Optix. I'd say the techniques are quite well documented by now, there's no magical ingredient needed.

The raytracing﻿ core is based on code released by NVidia, from the paper "Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs".

i got octane myself and i really enjoy using it :). its nice to see a new render engine heading blenders way

rock

04-27-2011, 05:57 AM

I hope this would put some fear, urgency and responsibilities in Autodesk.

From http://code.blender.org/index.php/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-blender-summer-of-polish-2

This year Google has been especially generous to Blender. We have the privilege of mentoring 17 students.

Some will be familiar faces from the Blender coding community, others are relatively new to the blender code base.

The talents of these students will be put to use all across the Blender core tool set as well as offering some exciting improvements and additions.

Mesh Editing/Retopology  Dan Walters was selected to implemented a number of new retopology tools and to polish existing mesh tools he will be mentored by Joe Eager (joeedh).

Sculpt/Paint  Jason Wilkins who worked on Blenders sculpt tools last year is returning to both further improve the sculpt tools as well as port many of the brushes and tools to our other paint modes, he will be mentored by Tom Musgrove (LetterRip).

UV Unwrapping  Shuvro Sarker was selected to implement some improvements to our uv tools. This was perhaps the toughest of the decisions since we had 5 excellent UV tool proposals this year. Andrea Weikert (elubie) will be mentoring Shuvro.

Weighting Tools  Jason Hays was selected to implement skin weighting tool improvements. He will be mentored by Campbell Barton.

UV/Paint Tools  Riakiotakis Antonis was selected to implement additional uv tool and painting tool improvements as well as possibly some additional weighting tools. He will also be mentored by Tom Musgrove.

Animation System Polish  Joshua Leung will be doing animation tool polishing addressing a number of issues to our star animators have identified as issues with Blender. He will be comentored by Bassam Kurdali (one of our talented animators) and Ton Roosendaal.

Motion Capture Tools -Benjamin Cook will implement a number of tools necessary for working with motion capture data including things like footskate cleanup. Campbell Barton (ideasman_42) will be mentoring.

Fluid Simulation Improvements  Christopher Neal will be working to implement some of Nils recent papers into our fluid simulator. He will be mentored by Daniel Genrich (Genscher)

Camera Tracker library improvements  Matthias Fauconneau will work on additional features for the libmv library so that it can fully meet Blenders camera tracking needs. Julien Michot, one of the main developers of libmv will be mentoring.

Improved Internationalization and Localization  Xiao Xiangquan will be working to improve Blenders abilities to work with translated text for our tools so that they can be better used by an international audience. Xiao will be mentored by Kent Mein (sirdude)

Nodes for the GE logic  Sven von Brand will work on nodifying our game logic system. This project will be mentored by Benoit Bolsee (ben2610)

BGE Animation improvements  Mitchell Stokes will improve the game engines handling of blender animation data for character animation and will be comentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) and Benoit Bolsee (benoit)

BGE bugfixing and polishing  Daniel Stokes will work on bug fixing and assorted minor tools and polishing for the game engine. He will be mentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto)

Collada  Prabhath Jayathilake will improve Blenders Collada support for animation and will be mentored by Nathan Letwory (jesterking)

Dynamic Paint  Miika Hδmδlδinen will work on improving his dynamic paint tool work-flow and will be mentored by Janne Karhu (jahka)

We would like to thank the many students who applied this year. We received a number of excellent proposals  many of them for the same areas including UV tools and Collada  which made for some difficult choices, with the number of excellent proposals being much greater than the number of slots available.

We are thrilled to see so much interest in Blender and would encourage students to get involved in Blender development outside of GSoC.

fablefox

04-27-2011, 08:06 AM

in reply to rock.

Seriously?

I mean, 17 project worked on for a summer actually scares the company that have lots and lots of developer working full time, all year long, and they able to hire these developers because they charge users?

I love Blender, I really do. I even bought "Blender Studio Project" book earlier this year. But i'm also tired of hearing "linux will takeover desktop market this year, LOL!" :beer:

AnonyMouse

04-27-2011, 09:57 AM

Is your avatar showing the punishment for failed Blender coders?

RebelPixel

04-27-2011, 09:58 AM

when they will change the horrible hotkeys, the workflow and most of the interface i will gladly take a look at blender, but at the moment its the most un-intuitive software to work with in my opinion.

CB_3D

04-27-2011, 11:08 AM

when they will change the horrible hotkeys, the workflow and most of the interface i will gladly take a look at blender, but at the moment its the most un-intuitive software to work with in my opinion.

Have you seen the latest version? Looks way cleaner and easier to adopt than for example Maya or Max.

blaize

04-27-2011, 12:01 PM

Why do we Blender users always try to convince others to switch to Blender?
i for one gave up on this, and think people should just try it if they find it interesting.

and yeah.. Brecht's new project looks cool, i wonder what will happen to it.
Is it the start of the new render engine, or just an experiment.

we'll see :P

DanielWray

04-27-2011, 12:03 PM

Same reason why Max, Maya, Lightwave, Zbrush, MudBox.... users do the same thing.

when they will change the horrible hotkeys, the workflow and most of the interface i will gladly take a look at blender, but at the moment its the most un-intuitive software to work with in my opinion.

I had another look at Blender a few weeks ago and I was totally lost. :surprised
Blender doesn't seem to follow any of the conventions most of us are familiar with and more or less expect when diving into a "new" 3D application.
I think it's great that there is a free app out there trying to take on the commercial DCC establishment as it were, but with their workflow so convoluted and aberrant, they're not doing themselves any favours.

CB_3D

04-28-2011, 04:18 AM

I had another look at Blender a few weeks ago and I was totally lost. :surprised
Blender doesn't seem to follow any of the conventions most of us are familiar with and more or less expect when diving into a "new" 3D application.
I think it's great that there is a free app out there trying to take on the commercial DCC establishment as it were, but with their workflow so convoluted and aberrant, they're not doing themselves any favours.

Hm, actually the workflow and tab organization is very similar to Max...

hvanderwegen

04-28-2011, 04:36 AM

I had another look at Blender a few weeks ago and I was totally lost. :surprised
Blender doesn't seem to follow any of the conventions most of us are familiar with and more or less expect when diving into a "new" 3D application.
I think it's great that there is a free app out there trying to take on the commercial DCC establishment as it were, but with their workflow so convoluted and aberrant, they're not doing themselves any favours.

Interesting. I came from a Max, Cinema 4D and Lightwave background, and had no problems at all getting up to speed even in Blender 2.4. Except for Max, I still use all other three for different types of work, and, in my opinion, there's not a whole lot of a difference in regards to the respective user interfaces. And Blender's workflow is actually quite efficient in comparison with the others. But to each his/her own.

Please do not allow this thread to become one of "those" threads again.

CHRiTTeR

04-28-2011, 06:14 AM

does blender have something like particle flow or thinking particles?

if not, is it planned for one of the next releases?

ktysdal

04-28-2011, 07:08 AM

does blender have something like particle flow or thinking particles?

if not, is it planned for one of the next releases?

I don't think it's planned for the next release, but the developer Phonybone has been working on a node based particle system.
You can read about it on his blog:
http://phonybone.planetblender.org/

AnonyMouse

04-28-2011, 10:28 AM

I don' think blender's interface is un-intuitive. Most people think that because it is free it should be very simple and easy. Tell me one 3d package which you can start for first time and begin the job, without reading the help, searching for tutorials, etc?
If one is used with some interface it doesn't mean it is the best solution.

RebelPixel

04-28-2011, 11:00 AM

For me the problem i had with blender is that i wanted to customize the hotkeys, but it has all the hotkeys already assigned, and the input panel in the preferences lists all the hotkeys wich are a freakton.

Now if you for example assign to a custom command the key "S" it wont work because it is previously assigned by default by blender, so you have to scroll down and spend a lot of time to see where it previously assigned the "S" and erase that, so it wont overwrite your custom hotkey.

this whole system makes the custom hotkey process a total nightmare and it is frustrating like hell, because the default blender hotkeys are too weird to me, starting from the 3d navigation.

Unless i overlook something and there is a way to assign custom hotkeys without deleting the previous one before, wich i'm not aware of.

Note that Cycles is BSD licensed, meaning your studio will be able to use it with custom code and not worry about the 'viral' nature of GPL.

EDIT - was misinformed - while originally BSD was considered apparently 'for now' will be GPL, but might go BSD at some later point.

stew

04-28-2011, 09:19 PM

Where do you see the BSD licencse? The code in SVN has the GPL license in it.

LetterRip

04-28-2011, 09:24 PM

Hmm, when I talked with brecht the other day

"Most of the code is BSD licensed, but there is some Apache licensed
BVH building code, and GPL licensed code for Blender textures."

Will confirm with him... perhaps he changed it when uploading?

stew

04-28-2011, 09:37 PM

The 3rd party code used by Cycles is partially BSD licensed (OpenImageIO, OpenShadingLanguage) or under other non-GPL free licenses (the BVH construction and traversal for example. However, all the code I've seen in Blender's SVN has the standard Blender copyright GPL header, including the code that was largely copied from the projects mentioned above.

For clarity, it might be best to keep a separate BSD licensed repository with the standalone version of Cycles that gets merged up to the Blender repository where Blender-specific things happen. Blender programmers would probably assume that all of their contributions are released under the GPL and some of them may not want to make their code available under the BSD license.

LetterRip

04-28-2011, 09:42 PM

Hopefully will have this cleared up later today or tommorrow (although the two devs who could answer most authoritatively might be asleep right now) - I'm guessing someone used a script to do the headers that shouldn't have been used.

mr_projects

04-29-2011, 09:32 AM

These were posted by jikz on http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering

Hopefully will have this cleared up later today or tommorrow (although the two devs who could answer most authoritatively might be asleep right now) - I'm guessing someone used a script to do the headers that shouldn't have been used.
Thanks, I appreciate it.

liquidik

04-30-2011, 10:52 AM

Have a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bDaRXvXG0E&feature=youtu.be

Bullit

04-30-2011, 11:10 AM

When this will be available for testing?

CHRiTTeR

04-30-2011, 11:45 AM

the future looks good

*edit:
nice coment on youtube:

"Everything you see is captured as is in realtime. There is no speed up."

Curious, considering the video's a little over a minute long, yet your clock starts at 11:57 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bDaRXvXG0E&feature=youtu.be#)﻿ and ends at 12:07 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bDaRXvXG0E&feature=youtu.be#). Still quite impressive, though.

lol, busted!

mib2berlin

04-30-2011, 12:21 PM

When this will be available for testing?

It is available for compiling yourself:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/cycles/
Or on graphicall.org
Search for cycles.

Cheers mib

Bullit

04-30-2011, 08:03 PM

Thanks mib2berlin

ice-boy

05-01-2011, 01:18 PM

windows 32 build
http://www.graphicall.org/106

fktt

05-02-2011, 09:52 PM

the future looks good

*edit:
nice coment on youtube:

lol, busted!

As I read in the description yesterday, apparently the youtube upload messed something up.

KayosIII

05-05-2011, 01:12 AM

I have now had a chance to play with it myself.
So far it is buggy but very nice - not only for the renderer itself but also for the improvements to the node based material system. CPU performance is descent though GPU much faster.

One thing that became apparent is that I am going to have to commit to better cooling in my home PC if I wan't to use it for extended periods of time. I really like the idea of using it to learn to become a better with materials/lighting.

tx_rx

05-06-2011, 09:34 AM

If anyone has problems getting cycles to operate as expected on Linux it needs Nvidia drivers 270 and above which isn't default in some builds. You may have to manually download and install them or seek out a Nvidia PPA.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful for this awesome development (along with the rest of blender's ever improving features!) I'd like to see it actually lift the approach that Luxrender is using, which is openCL, cpu & gpu along with some form of distributed network rendering possible.

Now imagine that if you will. :)

ShaderOp

05-06-2011, 11:16 AM

I'd like to see it actually lift the approach that Luxrender is using, which is openCL, cpu & gpu along with some form of distributed network rendering possible.
I would much prefer if they collaborated with the LuxRender developers instead of rolling their own same-ish solution. But I don't know the goals of either project that well, and the Blender guys could be heading down a different and incompatible path.

I do with them all the best of luck though :)

SoulVector

05-06-2011, 11:17 AM

Ive been playing around with it for a couple of minutes and I must say that it is fast. Compared to working in MentalRay and Vray it is a breeze. It has great potential.

SNJ

05-06-2011, 01:32 PM

Ton, indirectly, answered a lot of the questions raised here with this post, over a blenderartists.org (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering&p=1846342&viewfull=1#post1846342).

iamawizard

05-15-2011, 05:50 PM

Hi guys

I have been a 3dsmax user for almost 7 years
now I use blender
and below is an example of what blender internal renderer is capable of

www.vimeo.com/rwstudios

my team did this entirely inside blender
with enough dedication, blender can be used to do good enough commercial jobs

and its as intuitive as any other tools i have used

my 2 cents... :)

Sivaprasad Velayudhan
www.realworks.in

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